Portrait of a Lady

Before I had my long, lovely summer in search of Marcel Proust, I spent much of last winter inching slowly through three long Henry James novels. It took me an embarrassingly long time to finish each. I’m not even going to admit the number of weeks I spent laying out some of those more baroquely entangled sentences on the examination table, untwisting them, poking and prodding them like a medical examiner. You’d think I was the kind of reader who follows the text with his index finger, mouthing every syllable, repeating it to himself in dazed puzzlement like Yogi Berra in those AFLAC ads. Well, with James, at with least the late James, you nearly have to do that.

I confess that for a while I was trolling for an opera subject. I’d read “The Princess Casamassima” twenty years ago, mostly because I found irresistible the John Singer Sargent portrait of a certain dark haired woman, Lady Agnew, on the cover of the Penguin edition. She, Sargent’s model, is a beautiful and confident woman in perhaps her late twenties or early thirties, a woman of obvious wealth and what they used to call “breeding,” as most of Sargent’s commissioned portraits tended to be. She stares directly at the viewer with a calm, disarming candor. Her skin is pale and translucent, and there is an ever so slightly sleepy look in her hazel eyes.

It was a good choice by the art designer of Penguin to place Lady Agnew on the cover of “The Princess Casamassima” as a double, because the character of the princess in James’s novel is exactly as I imagine her. I still take the book in my hands and stare at her and wonder if I could interest her, entertain her, if only for an afternoon, play for her one or two of my less rowdy pieces. In the novel she is Christina Light, disturbingly alluring, born in Italy to an American mother and Italian father, fabulously wealthy, estranged from her tedious count of a husband. She moves around the continent and England with her dumpy German matron of a companion, renting estates or palaces for a summer or for part a winter season, trying to entertain herself and fight off the boredom of having too much and not knowing what to do with it. Finally she comes upon the ultimate entertainment, anarchist radicalism. I’d forgotten that France and England had their own version of Al Qaeda in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Workers and socially committed intellectuals formed anarchist cells—today we would call them terrorists—and they planned bombings and assassinations of the wealthy and the politically influential. Christina is cultured and refined enough to drive any man to distraction, but her preferred entertainment is spending time with a small group of very poor, working class folk who usually congregate in the stuffy, shabby apartment of a chronically ill, physically feeble young woman, Rose Muniment, whose brother is an active anarchist cell leader. The novel’s principal character is an orphan, Hyacinth Robinson, a small, painfully self-conscious bookbinder, the “bastard” son of a proud French woman and a careless, cruel British aristocrat whom she had murdered years ago in what was probably a fit of justifiable rage. The story is more Dickensian than any other James that I’ve read, with a genuine potboiler of a plot and many scenes of poverty and misery in and around London, something not normally encountered in the usual Jamesian bel monde. I thought of Renee Fleming as Christina, a perfect fit. But in the end I couldn’t find a way to do this story without it being a period piece. Transposing it into a contemporary setting seemed too great a stretch. So I bagged it.

Then I spent several months inching my way through two later works, “The Ambassadors” and “Wings of the Dove.” “The Ambassadors” is a gentle comedy of manners featuring a sympathetically imagined middle aged man, Lambert Strether, a congenial but somewhat passive fellow who has been sent to Paris at the behest of an American brass bitch of woman (whom we never actually meet) with the purpose of winning back her handsome twenty-something son Chad so that he can return home to some boring New England town and take over the family business, manufacturing— what?— toilet seats? pencil erasers? corsets? James never says. Chad has fallen in love with an “older” French woman, Marie de Vionnet, “older” being perhaps forty. She is married, but zut alors, she is French and, well you know the French…. an entente is always possible. So she has been Chad’s sentimental educator both in matters of culture and of sex for several years while his ramrod straight Yankee parents back home in Protestant Massachusetts are seething with annoyance (and probably envy). The handsome, sensitive Chad and his serene, elegant, sophisticated, worldly and generous French lover are a sweet pair, and Paris in May and June is a fragrant and subtle backdrop. The imagination runs wild. It’s a touching, low key comedy of manners, sharing some similar ground with Der Rosenkavalier in matters of the heart (older women in love with younger men, or vice versa), but it’s done with infinitely greater subtlety. The heartbreak at the end is more poignant, more real. No French horn whooping ejaculations in the bedroom here. Just a soft hand tenderly pressed one second longer than normal, or a boat ride on a summer afternoon under a lace parasol.

Here Strether, who’s been wandering around the cool, dark interior of Notre Dame, sits down on a bench to look at the medieval imagery on the walls, but instead notices the figure of Madame de Vionnet seated alone on a bench in front of him. She is not there for some lover’s tryst, but rather to be alone with her thoughts:

“…and he was struck with the tact, the taste of her vagueness, which simply took for granted in him a sense of beautiful things. He was conscious of how much it was affected, this sense, by something subdued and discreet in the way she had arranged herself for her special object and her morning walk—he believed her to have come on foot; the way her slightly thicker veil was drawn—a mere touch, but everything; the composed gravity of her dress, in which, here and there, a dull wine-colour seemed to gleam faintly through black; the charming discretion of her small compact head; the quiet note, as she sat, of her folded, grey-gloved hands. It was, to Strether’s mind, as if she sat on her own ground, the light honours of which, at an open gate, she thus easily did him, while all the vastness and mystery of the domain stretched off behind.”